Writer Max Read has a great newsletter called Read Max (great name) in which he talks about a variety of things, and in a recent one he asked his friend Dan Nosowitz to write about a tiny phone he became fascinated by recently, called the Unihertz Jelly 2. Dan, he said, has “a compulsion to purchase badly made, strangely designed, possibly quite dangerous gadgets from companies you’ve never heard of.”
“Where has the human-sized smartphone gone? Even normal sized phones are too big now, let alone the specifically large ones. Hands, meanwhile, have remained the same size, at least to the best of my knowledge. My advice to anyone looking for a small phone is to turn away from your conglomerates and your chaebols, and shun the iPhone and the Galaxy. Turn instead to this: The Unihertz Jelly 2.
I need to be clear, up front here, that this is not a traditionally “good” phone, in the sense of “it works consistently to the quality you have come to expect from flagship Samsung and Apple products,” and I am absolutely not a reliable narrator or guide. There is something wrong with my brain which causes me to dislike and distrust competently made and assembled electronics. I see the fact that the iPhone works consistently as a gigantic red flag. There are, in fact, many phones that work well. Too many. “Working well” is boring.”